THE FROGHORNS WERE BLOWING this morning.

That’s right. No typo. My family started using that bit of linguistic frippery years ago as we laughed with (not at) our friend Giovanna, for whom English was a second language. She enjoyed telling the story of how she had informed friends back in Italy that her new Pacific Northwest home was often “froggy” on summer mornings.

From Nuthatch cabin, I can know without opening my eyes whether it’s froggy, er, foggy on a summer morning. Starting about dawn, ferries crossing nearby Rosario Strait will blow their horns every two minutes as required by maritime rules. From our island, it’s a haunting echo, a bit akin to a belching bullfrog, or a bull elk, maybe. It actually makes it easier to turn over and go back to sleep, knowing we’re fogged in.

It’s that time of year. Hot, sunny summer days often lead to the right conditions for morning fog. In fact, the warm month of August has long been known as “Fogust” in these islands. Barbara and I once waited aboard our sailboat anchored off Decatur Island until 6 p.m. before an August “morning fog” lifted from Rosario Strait, where the blinding white mist can run like a river.

With climate change, fog is coming earlier in the season. This weekend, our temperatures are forecast to reach the upper 80s, as warm as I’ve ever experienced it here, while the Seattle area will roast at over 100 degrees. This is when all of us on our little island thank our lucky stars. On a rock of fewer than 200 acres, nobody is far from the Salish Sea’s cooling influence.

With June sun, the towering foxgloves are in full bloom, along with the gorgeous cascades of tiny ivory flowers on the aptly named oceanspray shrub, one of my favorite native plants of the San Juans.

My brother Tom is happily staying for a few months from his home in southern Arizona, which has experienced shocking heat in recent weeks.

While he’s here, we’re having fun exploring the islands a bit. Last week, we took my old pickup, Ranger Rick, aboard the state ferry from Lopez to Orcas Island. The inter-island ferry routes rarely experience the huge lines you get on ferries to and from Anacortes, the conduit to the mainland. The round-trip fare to take a vehicle from Lopez to Orcas is about $30 in the peak season, not too painful for a mini-vacation.

We hiked the shore of pristine Mountain Lake, where we could see foot-long trout swimming in the clear water, drove to the top of Mount Constitution, spent a pleasant hour shopping at Orcas Island Pottery, wandered the public areas of Rosario mansion and ate a tasty dinner (with table service!) at Mijita’s Mexican Kitchen.

Tomorrow we’ll take the ferry to Friday Harbor as walk-on passengers (fare-free on inter-island routes; it feels deliciously like we’re getting away with something). I’ll meet with my boating friends and get a first tour with the owners of Osprey, the Nordic Tug on which we’ll cruise to Alaska next summer. Tom will explore the town’s many shops and eateries.

Enjoy your summer, and keep cool if you can.

THIS SPRING ISN’T GETTING any easier at the Nuthatch. We buried Bosun today, next to Compass and Rose, among blooming salal beneath the tall firs.

Our dear old tuxedo cat, who was old enough to vote if the San Juan County Clerk had just let him register, was in what we were calling his third “bonus year” since suffering a stroke in 2018. He’d had at least one more stroke since then, on top of failing kidneys and hyperthyroidism. But he was the Comeback Kid, bouncing back and refusing to give in to his ailments. His trademark was a booming purr anytime you touched him. He kept purring until just a few days ago.

When the purring stopped, we knew he was in trouble. He stopped eating and drinking early this week. His body had decided it was time to go. Bosun wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, but he was falling down and couldn’t use his sandbox anymore. We were afraid he was going to fall down the stairs and break every bone in his body. We couldn’t let him go that way. So on Thursday I took our old friend in his travel carrier on the water taxi to a veterinary clinic near Mount Vernon. He came home in a box.

It’s been a tough spring.

Bosun was a good cat. He spent much of his life on our sailboat, Sogni d’Oro, where we lived until moving to our island cabin three years ago. He was our third cat with a nautical name, following Compass and Rose, and he sailed the San Juans with us summer after summer. He was the beta cat, the big softie who got bossed around by smaller females. (And what male hasn’t, at some time in their life?) He was a sweet-tempered boy who liked to plant himself smack dab between me and Barbara in bed at night. It tended to hamper our social agenda. But when you tried to pry him off the bed and got that rumbling purr, what could you do?

Daughter Lillian was here to help nurse him in his final days, along with my brother, Tom, who arrived from Arizona on Tuesday.

Bosun was a sweet old cat, and he was my good old friend. I told him to go be Barbara’s kitty now.

BARBARA WANTED ME to keep writing.

For my 65th birthday, five days after she passed away, I got the gift of a packet of reporter’s notebooks, the slim, coil-bound pads that every journalist carries in a pocket — all over the world, in my case. They aren’t easy to come by if you don’t work for a newspaper, but Barbara had found them online and ordered me a bunch. She planned to give them to me at the birthday party she didn’t get to attend.

It would be easy to pack it in and stop writing. She represented so much in my life that was good and happy and comfortable. And I like to write about the good, happy and comfortable parts of life. I don’t like learning that it’s hard to insert contact lenses when your eyes are full of tears. I don’t like waiting to awaken from this bad dream so I can hear her call me to dinner.

But Barbara, Nuthatch Cabin’s friendly ghost, would want me to write about the good parts, so that’s what this post is about — a visit from an old buddy who didn’t hesitate to come running when I needed company. A week ago, my friend Ken Brinkley came up from Portland for a five-night visit.

It reminded me of a painful time 15 years ago when I went to Ken’s side after a sailing tragedy took the life of his wonderful 18-year-old son, Andy. I asked him to come now, in part, because I knew he’d been through the kind of grinding grief I’m facing.

It happens that I met Ken for the first time in these islands. It was the 1980s, and a group of colleagues from The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Washington, where I worked for 10 years, took a party weekend at Rosario Resort, on Orcas Island. (Incidentally, it was a stupid place to party. I seem to recall a late-night visit from a sheriff’s deputy.)

Ken, who was married to one of my co-workers, stood up at a meal gathering and asked if anybody else was interested in hiring a sailboat for an afternoon on the sparkling waters of East Sound. I was the only one to raise my hand.

It was the start of a 35-year friendship. Barbara and I later joined Ken and his (now-ex) wife in chartering a larger sailboat in the San Juans, an adventure that eventually led us to acquire Sogni d’Oro, the sailboat on which we explored these islands every summer for decades, and sailed to Mexico in the mid-1990s.

Just having company at the Nuthatch this past week was a blessing. I did all the cooking, with tips I’d learned from Barbara (vegan barbecue rarely tasted so good) and a menu prepared with the help of daughter Lillian, who had returned to Seattle and work. Ken pitched in and helped me with rough and tough cabin chores that had been deferred for months. The hard work was a good distraction from sadness. He brought a bulging satchel of old movies. (All VHS tapes! Ken is 10 years older than I.)

After a trip to the Lopez Island dump on Sunday, we took a sack lunch and hiked to gorgeous Shark Reef Sanctuary, where we sprawled on a sunny cliffside and watched gray whales spout and tail-slap among the roiling tidal waters off Cattle Point. The morning Ken departed, we sat at a favorite Center Island bluff with a view of the snow-draped Olympic Mountains and sun-dappled Lopez Sound, where an otter dove and played. I’d never seen either of those creatures in those places. I think Barbara is pulling strings for me now.

It’s just me and the cats in our cabin for the next few days. The loneliness can be grueling, but I have other visits in the offing. Sometimes an old friend, ready to listen and ready to help, is life-saving nourishment for an emotionally starving man.

Barbara wanted me to keep writing. Here I am.

An old friend from college, Kathy Pruitt, sent this poem that gives her comfort when thinking about loved ones who have passed away.

Finding you in Beauty

The rays of light filtered through
the sentinels of trees this morning.
I sat in the garden and contemplated.
The serenity and beauty
of my feelings and surroundings 
completely captivated me.
I thought of you.
I discovered you tucked away
in the shadows of the trees.
Then, rediscovered you
In the smiles of the flowers
as the sun penetrated their petals
In the rhythm of the leaves
falling in the garden
In the freedom of the birds
as they fly searching as you do.
I'm very happy to have found you,
Now you will never leave me
For I will always find you in the beauty of life.
-- Walter Rinder